Scott Thompson and northern werewolf lesbians

25 Oct 2023 -

Two years ago my friend Scott Thompson was offered an acting job on a movie called My Animal. He was set to play the grumpy old dad to a young figure skater. His character is a figure skater himself, so in those scenes Scott would have to be doubled by hunky Olympic figure skater Eric Radford. If all this doesn’t seem hilarious enough, get this - the whole thing was being shot in my home town of Timmins.

For those of you who don’t know, Timmins is a mining town 400 miles north of Toronto. It is near nowhere, has a population of maybe 40,000, and it snows a lot in winter. It is best known as the hometown of country music superstar Shania Twain. But no one would ever think to go to Timmins to shoot a movie. Trust me, it’s not Hollywood. You would only shoot there for two reasons - the locations, and the tax credits.

Scott took the job. But the idea of flying up on those tiny airplanes terrified him, so he opted for ground transport. The drive takes about eight hours one way. The first time he went up - and this is not only in the midst of the quarantine, but also during the brutal Northern Ontario winter - someone tested positive for Covid, so the shoot had to be cancelled. The second time he went up, it was for one shot. The third time he went up, he finally got to do his big scene, blowing off the lesbian in love with his daughter, the whole time holding a fluffy little dog in his arms. It’s quite a performance, and it only took 48 hours of highway driving. 

On September 8, Crave finally released My Animal, and it’s not half bad. The story concerns a girl who is, like her dad, a werewolf. She falls in love with a gorgeous black girl and there is considerable blow-back amongst their hick peers. In the end, her fury transforms her into a monster and she kills the asshole who’s bugging her. There’s only about five seconds of werewolf face, though, so don’t expect lots of FX and gore.

The director, Jacqueline Castel, is talented, and the camera work and visual design actually enhanced the Timmins settings. My partner Georges is also from Timmins, and we kept pointing to the screen and yelling out the names of the various locations. Thank God we weren’t in a movie theatre. But there is one preposterous section where the teenagers go to the casino. A casino in Timmins? I wish. That said, they also trip out on shrooms while there, and it allows for some of Castel’s most stylish visual flourishes. It didn’t surprise me to learn that Castel had worked with David Lynch and Jim Jarmusch in the past.

Likely the first feature film shot entirely within the city limits of Timmins, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the cast, isolated by Covid and deep snow, seeing only about three hours of daylight and trapped inside drab hotel rooms, all this for both the visual elegance and the tax credits that shooting in a place like Timmins can provide. I enjoyed My Animal, but it would have been an even better movie if it had co-starred Shania Twain.